Quality of life in the concept of strategic management for Smart Cities

Smart City concepts are facing ecological, economic and social changes, creating opportunities for better lives, sustainability, development and resilience. Yet strategic management has to flexibly respond to ongoing changes, adapt to trends in the outside environment and, in particular, ensure common elements of Smart City concepts such as the quality of life. While significant, the term “quality of life” is somewhat ambiguous at present, not understood comprehensively, and no set of factors to measure it in cities exists. This paper seeks to respond to the gap in the research by developing its own definition of quality of life, identifying the factors that need to be evaluated in sustainable Smart Cities according to best practice. The objective set out was fulfilled by means of the secondary analysis of articles about the quality of life in Smart Cities and by comparing and summarising them, along with induction, deduction, abstraction and logic. The most frequently used factors were mainly found to be the environment and social inclusion; essentially, ecological and social aspects in combination with hard and soft factors. In theoretical terms, the contributions of this paper to the field are the definition, the analysis undertaken and results for fellow researchers. The practical benefits mainly encompass the strategic management of cities through a set of frequent factors used in international best practice.